by Jenn Bishop
Audrey takes a step closer to me, bridging the gap between us. She reaches out her hand, so unsure of what she’s supposed to do next. But I don’t take it yet. I’m not close enough. Not ready.
I shove my hands in my pockets. “He abandoned me, my dad. My real dad. He left me forever three years ago. And he’s never coming back.”
I wait for the confused look to spread across her face before turning into anger. Wait for that moment when she realizes who I really am. A liar, just like my dad. Wait for that moment when she backs away and leaves, that moment when she realizes she’s in way, way over her head with me. I mean, look at this place.
But the moment doesn’t come. Instead she says, “I know.”
“No.” A sob catches in my throat. “No, you don’t.”
But Audrey nods. “I do, Drew. I know the truth.” I try to look in her eyes, but her glasses keep fogging up. “About his suicide.”
No one ever says it that way—so bluntly. As if saying “he passed away” instead changes things. Except it never does. It just makes it easier for them, so they don’t have to think about it. So they can pretend it away.
But Audrey isn’t pretending like everyone else. And she’s still here, standing right in front of me, not even bothered that I lied to her about everything, that I dragged her on this wild-goose chase only to end up in the giant mess of my dad’s shed, the truth exactly what it was at the beginning.
I don’t know why she does it then, except that it’s sort of like Audrey to do the unexpected thing. She hands me the plastic bag. “I got Gatorade and ginger ale. I wasn’t sure what you’d want.”
I take out the Gatorade, the lemon-lime kind that looks like it’s radioactive, and crack open the top. Over in the corner of the shed, beneath the window, are two boxes I haven’t destroyed yet. They look sturdy enough to sit on.
Once we’re sitting down, I gulp some Gatorade and clear my throat. “Did Mrs. Eisenberg tell you?”
“You know how you said he’s a dentist?”
I nod.
“My mom needed to schedule a teeth cleaning for my dad, so I told her how your dad was a dentist and that she should look him up. She acted kind of funny about it. I forget what she said, but it left me with a weird feeling, so I …” She bites her lip. “I shouldn’t have gone behind your back. I should have asked you. I didn’t think we were going to end up friends. I just—”
Gone behind my back? “What do you mean?”
“I googled. That’s how I found his obituary. It didn’t include a cause of death—it was vague—so I kept looking.” Audrey stares down at her feet.
“Looking … where?” It weirds me out a little, thinking of her digging around. Truth is, I don’t know what exactly is out there. I was nine. I wasn’t looking then.
“Everywhere. All the places. I—” She swipes a piece of hair out of her face. “I was supposed to stop and I didn’t, okay? I was doing it all over again. I know. I know. I’m such a weirdo. I mean—” Audrey huffs. “Of course I was already a weirdo anyway.” She closes her eyes, and for a second I notice how long her eyelashes are. Are they really that long or do her glasses make them even longer?
“Audrey, stop.”
She rubs a finger under her eyes and adjusts her glasses. “What?” Her voice comes out small, un-Audrey like.
“How hard did you …” I try to imagine it: Audrey up late at night on her computer at home, searching and searching for stuff about my dad. The more I think about it, the less I’m weirded out. That kind of searching takes effort. Time. She did all of that … for me. “How’d you figure it out in the end?”
“I found this post your mom wrote on a message board a couple months after.”
Mom wrote on a message board? “But how did you know what to look for?”
“You really want to know? Really?” She stares back at me, her face turning from pinkish red to a more normal pale.
I take a sip of Gatorade. “Kind of.”
“I checked your mom’s Facebook. But that was set to private because she’s smart and everything, so then I found her Yelp page, which had her username, and then I searched that username and the word ‘husband’ and that’s how I found the message board where she wrote about his suicide.”
Whoa. That is a lot. I can’t help being impressed with Audrey. She could be a private detective someday. But still, it’s weird to think of her reading stuff my mom wrote, especially so soon after. She probably wrote it online because she didn’t want anyone who really knew her to know what she was thinking. And maybe she still doesn’t. “What did she say?”
Audrey stares out at an upturned box that used to be full of files from Dad’s work. “That’s the thing,” she says. “When you go looking, you don’t know what you’re going to find. I shouldn’t have seen what your mom wrote. It wasn’t for me. She was sad and angry and she just wanted to find someone who would listen. I mean, of course you can find it and read it if you want to. Freedom of information and all that jazz. But think about it first. Do you really want to know?”
She’s right. I can’t find out that way. It’s one thing for Audrey to see that, but another for me. If I really want to know, I need to ask Mom face-to-face.
“Audrey?”
“Yeah.”
“You said you did this before?”
Audrey nods, and when she says, “Yeah,” it’s in that small voice again.
“What happened?”
“At my last school, I was the new kid again, so I thought it’d help if I knew a lot about everyone at the school. That I’d fit in. No one would need to explain things to me. But … it turns out that actually the people you think are your friends will stop being your friends when they discover that you Google-stalked them and already know everything about them.”
I wince.
“Yeah.” Audrey chews on her lip. “It’s never been easy for me, making friends. Not like it was with you. At the end of August, I’ll have to start all over again at a new school and …” Her voice keeps getting higher, like she’s about to start crying. “I just don’t know why it’ll be any different. I mean, I haven’t changed. They won’t like me, I know it.”
“That’s not true.”
“Which part?”
“All of it. Look, when we first met, it wasn’t like we became instant BFFs. Things take time. But you have changed. Are you kidding me? Audrey, you held a baby. That’s huge. And the kids at the library are totally warming up to you.”
She stops chewing her lip. “Really?”
“When you were upstairs this morning, Chloe Irving came in with her mom and she said she didn’t want to get her prize until you were back because you were really good at helping her choose the best one.”
Audrey glances up at the ceiling. “Wait, is she the one with the adorable cat shoes?”
I nod. “See!” I finish off the Gatorade in a few gulps.
The plastic bag crinkles as Audrey takes out the can of ginger ale. “You mind if I have this?”
I let out a little laugh. “You bought it.”
“Actually, my mom did.”
Suddenly it occurs to me that I don’t even know how Audrey got here. “Is she waiting in her car out there?”
Audrey shakes her head. “She dropped me off. I just have to call her when I’m ready to get picked up.”
I’m still having a hard time believing she came out here, came after me, when that whole time I was keeping the full truth from her.
Audrey cracks the can open and ginger ale fizzes out. She brings it up to her mouth quickly, but not before a bunch spills out, trickling down her chin and wetting her shirt. She laughs at herself. “Oops.”
It’s so quiet I can hear the tiny bubbles tinkle against the metal of the can. It’s crazy to think the whole world is just on the other side of this door. My house, Mr. Quintana’s next door, Filipe’s—it feels so much farther away. As if this is some kind of secret hideaway. Was that how it felt for Dad? Was that why he’d
hang out in here?
“My dad,” Audrey says, clearing the air, “he had this friend back in Pasadena, Bill, another scientist. Bill died from a suicide too. He lived by himself, so he used to come over to our house a lot for dinner. He and my dad would sit around the dining room table for hours talking about their experiments. Bill’s the one who got me listening to Puccini. He was a total geek for opera. For a while after it happened, my dad was so sad. Almost like he felt guilty. He wished he’d been able to get Bill help, that he’d known how Bill was really feeling.”
“That sucks,” I say. “For your dad … and for Bill.”
Audrey plays with the tab on her ginger ale can. “It sucks for you, too.” The tab breaks off, dropping in the can unexpectedly with a plunk. Audrey turns to me, and for a few seconds we’re just staring at each other. I can’t imagine what she sees when she looks at me. My eyes are probably still red from crying—bawling—in front of her just a few minutes ago. I swipe again at my nose, sure somehow it’s boogery from earlier.
When Filipe and I would watch a movie with a moment like this—where someone’s upset and then the other one gets them to calm down and then there’s this quiet pause—we’d chant, “Kiss! Kiss! Kiss!” Most of the time we were joking. “Come on!” Filipe would yell. “Make out already.” One time Anibal walked into the living room during one of those scenes and cracked up at us. “Guess this is as close as you two will get for a while.”
Filipe chucked a cookie at Anibal’s face, barely missing. He wasn’t wrong.
Now, I know Audrey’s not going to kiss me. And I’m not brave enough to kiss Audrey anytime soon. But is she thinking about it the way I am? Is that why her cheeks are suddenly so red?
The door to the shed flings open. “Drew!”
My mom stands in the doorway, her hand flying to her mouth when she sees what a disaster this place has become.
She marches toward me, not bothering where she steps, her feet crunching all kinds of things. She ignores Audrey and wraps her arms around me something fierce, a hug so tight I can barely breathe. “Mom,” I struggle to say, my words muffled by her sweater.
When she finally pulls away, I notice how messy her ponytail is, like she redid it fifty times on the way home from Newport. What time is it, anyway? She’s not supposed to be back until five o’clock.
“I’m just glad you’re okay.” Her lip quivers. She reaches up to fix her hair, like suddenly she’s remembered it’s a mess. “Pauline texted to let me know she’d dropped you off, something about you getting sick. But then when I texted you, you didn’t reply. I called the house phone. I called over to Filipe’s in case you’d gone over there, but no one answered. Drew, I didn’t know what to think.”
Audrey shifts on the box like she’s trying to figure out her next move and Mom suddenly notices her. “Hi, Audrey,” Mom says with a tiny wave.
“I brought Drew something to help settle his stomach.”
“Wasn’t that thoughtful of you.” Mom begins to take it all in, the mess I’ve made of her “she shed,” although I guess it really isn’t a she shed yet.
Audrey stands up. “I … I should get going.”
“Do you need a ride?” Mom asks.
“My mom can get here in a few minutes. She’s close by.”
“You sure?”
“I’m sure.” Still holding the ginger ale can in her hand, Audrey steps carefully over the boxes, broken picture frames, papers, and loose photos until she’s at the door. Mom left it ajar when she came in, the sunlight streaming in on a slant.
For a second, the light catches Audrey’s hair and it looks like it’s glowing. Someday, maybe not too long from now, she’ll definitely be the girl who gets kissed in the movie.
“See you tomorrow?” she asks me, her hand on the door.
“Yeah. Tomorrow.”
Once Audrey’s gone, Mom turns to me. “Drew,” she says. “What’s going on?”
28
I CHEW ON THE INSIDE of my cheek as I try to figure out where to start, the pain and confusion from earlier suddenly boomeranging back. “Why didn’t you tell me the truth? Phil was Dad’s best friend … right?”
Mom slowly nods. “How did you … ?”
“The yearbook.”
“Was that why you were out here a couple weeks ago?”
“No,” I say. “Audrey and I got it from the library. Interlibrary loan.”
“Through Loretta?”
“Does it matter? Come on, Mom. Tell me. Tell me the truth. How did you and Dad and Phil all know each other?”
“I thought you knew your dad and I met in high school, Drew. That wasn’t meant to be a secret. Honestly, I worried telling you too much about Phil right off the bat would give you the wrong impression.”
Had I really misremembered it? Told myself a new story about them from the fuzzy details I did remember?
“Anyway, would it help to go over all of this again, from the beginning? Set the record straight?”
As I nod, Mom takes a seat on the box where Audrey had been sitting. “When I was a kid, we moved a lot. You remember that, right?”
“Yeah.” The truth is, a lot of Mom’s life is still sort of a mystery to me. Maybe I was too busy living my own life to wonder about it much before. I picked up bits and pieces when we all got together as a family, but if you asked me to write down my mom’s life story before I was born, I’m not sure I could come up with more than a few paragraphs.
“It wasn’t until high school that we settled in one place for a long stretch of time. Suddenly I was in the suburbs of Denver, the new girl in tenth grade, and I met someone. Phil.”
“So he was your boyfriend. Why didn’t you just say that?”
“That was almost thirty years ago, Drew. Never in a million years would I have thought …” A tiny smile creeps across Mom’s face before she clears her throat. “Anyway! Phil had lived his whole life in the same town. I envied him. He’d established real roots there. Everyone in town knew him and his family.
“Phil and your dad had been best friends since they were little. Sandbox buds, like you and Filipe. Through Phil, I got to know your father, and … well … we were young, and when you’re young, it’s so easy to fall in love. There’s no real world to contend with, not yet.”
“Did you cheat on Phil with Dad?”
“Whoa! Hey now.” Mom laughs.
“Well?”
“No, not exactly. But I did have feelings for your dad before I broke things off with Phil. It was complicated, Drew. They were best friends. Needless to say, Phil didn’t take it well. And he and your dad, they were never close after that.”
“Was Phil still in love with you?”
“He started dating Stacy Adams pretty quickly after, so …” Mom shrugs. “The thing is, Phil and your dad had all those years of closeness. Shared memories of times I don’t know about. When we graduated and went our separate ways, I never stayed in touch with Phil. And neither did your dad. We came out to Boston for grad school and built our life here on the East Coast.
“Not long after your dad died, I signed up for Facebook. It helped, catching up with old friends. Turns out Phil had heard about Dad, but he couldn’t come back for the funeral because he was teaching overseas in South Korea. We stayed in touch, loosely, in the way that you sort of know way too much about everyone if you check Facebook, and then when he mentioned he was coming out this way in the summer, I started to think that, while it would be nice for me to see him and catch up a bit, it could also be good for you to get to know him.”
“Me?”
“A lot of time has passed since your dad died. Three-plus years is huge when you’re still a kid, and it’s natural that you’re having more questions. I’m worried that you don’t really remember your dad, that the way he died has colored everything you remember of him. And I thought Phil might be able to help you get to know what your dad was like when he was your age. You don’t have any aunts and uncles on that side, and with Grammy
in a nursing home …
“But then.” Mom laughs. “Your reaction to Phil, when he came! Oh gosh, Drew, if you could have murdered him with your eyes …”
“I wasn’t that bad.”
“Drew.” Mom eyeballs me.
“Okay, okay. Sorry.”
She squeezes my knee. “I get it. Maybe it could have worked if he hadn’t gotten here ahead of schedule, if I’d been able to do a better job preparing you. Never mind that …”
“What?”
“Well, I didn’t bet on liking him. People change a lot over the years. They evolve. Phil and your dad, they took such different paths in life.”
“You like Phil’s path more? The motorcycle thing?”
“Actually, the motorcycle terrifies me, to be quite honest. Don’t think you’re getting on that thing anytime soon.”
“Good luck breaking that to Xander.”
There’s this tingly feeling in my arms and legs, the kind that make me want to shake it out. I think I get where it comes from now. Keeping secrets.
“Can I tell you something crazy?” I ask. “You have to promise you won’t tell anyone else, though. No one at the library. And not Phil, okay?”
“What is it?”
“You promise?”
Mom nods solemnly.
“I thought maybe Phil came for another reason.”
“As in … ? I’m sorry, hon, I don’t follow.”
“I thought maybe—remember, you promised—maybe Phil was my real dad.”
Mom is quiet for a moment when I say it, and I can feel her eyes on me even if I can’t look up at her face just yet.
“I guess …” I stare at a knot in the wooden floor, remembering all the time I spent with Dad in here. How I’d sit up on the workbench, swinging my legs back and forth in the way that always drives Mom crazy but never bothered Dad. The way he would throw his head back and laugh, sometimes until he was crying, when I said something funny. And how we could just be quiet together, each doing our own thing, totally okay in the silence.
